Building a Home Base (and a Video Game)

We've been in our current space for almost a year. Our decision to move had been a long time in the making. We were packed tight like sardines in our old space, and only after leaning heavily on our spatial relations skills as designers were we able to fit in one more desk when we made our last full-time hire.

Remembering our building hunt, we considered a couple of other spaces. Jeb's main stipulation – that our office be walking distance to the record store – kept our search reigned in to a few choices. When we visited the old Broad Ripple Library, we knew this was the perfect space for our HQ.

A Collaborative Space

Having come from a pretty cramped, dark quarters, we were easily wooed by the floor to ceiling windows. There was simply so much to love about this space. The original bookcases, never painted or otherwise mucked up, had survived a rotation of who knows how many businesses. We knew the courtyard with it's slate tiles, a tree in the center, would serve as a perfect space for quick meetings and breaks. The wide open main room represented much more than just a place to park our desks. This was clearly a space that would allow us to better live out our core value of collaboration.

A couple of weeks ago, after nearly a year of renting the space, we made it official and bought the building. To us, it's a pretty significant step, the beginning of our next phase of growth as a company. And of course, we celebrated. Mayowa caught a little video of the action as we toasted the building purchase.

We couldn't invite you all to join us for our bubbly toast, but in the spirit of celebration, we can let you in on a secret project our developer, Jordan built for fun...

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you might remember our mural project, created by Brain Twins during the fifth edition of Factory Week. Jordan digitized the art to create a background for a video game, which features a few of our favorite things – Broad Ripple, zombies and vinyl.

Since we only just purchased this building, we're planning to be here for a long time to come. Only trouble is, there's this swarm of zombies trying to take down our space. Try your hand at the game, and see if you can save your brains and our building from certain zombie demise. How many zombies can you slay with vinyl? As of this posting, the known record is 198. If you can beat it, screen capture, or it didn't happen!

Credits:
Video game artwork based off of a mural created by BrainTwins.
Music in the toast video // Personally Engraved by Consumers from EP in a Weekend

Disclaimer: We only ran partial browser testing on the video game before we needed to move on to other things. It tested well in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer as well as on iPhone.